source: http://i.imgur.com/O7Ynjd0.jpg

duckroll said:
I found this fight pretty disappointing in terms of animation. The movements lack weight and something about the swords and the camera perspective feels off. Bahi JD is a really talented animator, so I know he's capable of better than this...

I see plenty of appealing little Bahi-isms throughout this animation in terms of how he handles momentum and the sense of bounce and bob.
...but there's the fact that such appealing energy shows itself in such narrow windows of expression and the fact that the fight scene, given how you responded to it, seems less than the sum of its parts.

This scene seems to have the ingredients: a strong animator working within a storyboard that constricts him.
I could be wrong in thinking this, of course, but: I'm betting that the storyboard artist drew this with a limited vision of what it would look like in motion. The shot selections. Those close up shots of feet coming to a halt (0:02, 0:22), the close up shot of the hand lifting the sword before it thrusts (0:28) and the way this scene is laid out overall comes off to me as something a manga artist would draw.

Close up shots like those are an easy way to draw the viewer's attention to a subtlety of movement without having to draw what the entire body would be doing to support that movement. I consider it kind of a weak way to "shoot" a scene, and a scene would be so much more fun to experience without those kinds of phoned in, relatively disjointed shots depriving the audience of the full flow of the dance.
Even some of my favorite manga artists (like Tetsuro Ueyama) do this shizz.

Edit (months later): This comment is on the wrong upload; it was intended for the upload in which Bahi's portion of this scene and this portion of the scene weren't separated.

Stop tagging Bahi in this post.

Ashita said:
Stop tagging Bahi in this post.

Reason?